Chapter 143: – Burn Bright, Midnight Sun

Agmon felt his comprehension slip at the coming of the emergence of several paper talismans, and their eruption in pale flame. With a screech resounding and the flaring of dark light as if an Archon Flash, an eclipsed moon of burning glass emerged above the green-eyed demon’s head. And lo, pale fire blazed up from behind it, and flowed out in tendrils, and changed all of the green-eyed demon’s magicks in an instant. The missiles’ ends split into fanged mouths, and the mass of blackness, too, began flickering with motes of that pale flame.

The missiles rained down upon them with the vengeance and will of an orchestrated intellect, impossibly as if each was under her direct control. The black sphere at her left hand burst and a flood of condensed blackness next engulfed the campsite, spreading out past the pillars; smoke or perhaps ashes, at first in line with Blackhand’s documented use of smoke screens, but its behavior rapidly moved well past the realm of such things. Agmon could scarcely discern its outline at first, and entirely lost conception of where it ended and the true dark of the night began as it spread out. Like grasping hands it reached out, glittering specks disrupting vision and even blocking Agmon’s sight with merciless disregard.

He could see them, the energies moving, and yet there was such a maelstrom of them and it all unfolded so rapidly that he could not parse more than mere pieces, more than single frames of the whole. The missiles. The living smoke. The summoned eclipse.

The stone hands. Rushing out, emerging seamlessly from the black, the limbs of a greater being, to smash and grasp and put into the ground, dodging past barriers with an agility that disrespected the efforts of their victims. Some struck and grappled outright, but Agmon plainly saw one grasp a man by the head, and his entire body went up in pale flames, leaving only a shriveled, charred husk, as if he had been cooked from within and drained by an enormous insect. Agmon, then, realized that she had no wards; or rather, she had possessed no wards until just now, when she had stolen them from that thaumaturge. He could see them, plain as day, reassembling around her, broken fragments glued together by tar and smoke.

Gunshots constantly rung out, not only from the raven but from Blackhand as well, firing both bullets and theurgies as if she had complete command of whatever bullet came into the chamber next, as if the gun was just an extension of her hand. One after another talisman papers flew through the air, some tossed by her and others by that raven. Two landed within sight, and fanged mouths opened in their place, and from within reached immense, lengthy arms, each the size of a grown man, with six clawed fingers and bizarre restraints nailed into them, holding shut slits down the lengths of their forearms. One grasped a man where he stood, while the other split open to reveal a horrifying maw of jagged fangs and a tendrilous tongue, with spit that burned a pale shade, and the summoned arms took to devouring the thaumaturge as he thrashed and screamed burned and withered in their grasp. He had ceased thrashing well before he died, for they had nailed him in place.

To say it was one thing after another would have been an understatement, as they overlapped; the red-haired one had awoken. The edifices surrounding the camp site stirred into motion, unfolding and rising from their places as if they were automata, and yet they moved with purpose and within them burned the same exact spirit as if all five were merely extensions of the red-haired man’s body. Streaks of death arced from them, scything down the Stillborn and smashing apart Barriers with merciless brutal force and persistence. Flying cutters of red-hot metal, strange grasping spears that flew through the air and cut into steel and wards just as well as flesh to drag off their prey, and another rampaged about with the abnormally ordinary armament of a sword. One pointed at a Dreadmorph with its disproportionately large hand, and, with a gesture and a great outpouring of the red-haired man’s alien energy, it crumpled the warrior into a ball of gore where he stood.

There, at her back, sneaking up, Agmon spotted Kalman, a quasi-saurian battle-thaumaturge, a famous swordsman with twin split-end scimitars. He drew his blades and, invoking the blessings of Vikshe the Green, set them alight with green fire, doubling their length and magnifying their strength such that they could cleave a fully armored Mamon Knight of his same rank asunder in one blow.

Tendrils of black tar lashed out from Blackhand’s back and smacked his swords aside as if he were a petulant child, and two of the red-hair man’s puppets then set upon him. In moments, the swordsman was bested in his life’s discipline by an unliving thing, his wards cut asunder by a searing-orange spinning cutter, and his head burst like a ripe melon by an invisible force directly from the red-haired man. It was as if his mere gaze could kill.

Not more than twenty meters away, a cluster of three Dreadmorphs spearheaded an advance into the morass, their bodies glistening with emitter membranes. The frontman’s body was dark, almost black with mighty plates of armor, and his emitters formed a sonic barrier to deflect nearly any attack, a true bulwark! The two behind him were smaller, each with four arms, their dispersed blasts tearing the shroud of evil smoke asunder, while more focused ones shot down the small missiles that now swarmed towards them in punishment for daring to approach.

Only for a tendril of tar, which had snuck through, to place three talismans behind them. The shape that emerged, of a torso and two arms, matched the Stillborn in monstrosity and Dreadmorphs in its embodiment of pure, brutal force. A head of stone, a body shod with an armored frame that seemed a protection as much as a restraint. And in its entirety, it burned with the pale fire of that eclipse, bursting out from every-which-gap, from the points where the nails were hammered into its joints to the interlocking rings of its armored neck.

“Crucify them!” Agmon read from the green-eyed demon’s lips. And the summoned eidolon enacted the command with savagery and terrible prowess that Agmon had rarely witnessed. It was as if being merely an upper body, being fixed in place, were no restraints to it at all. Agmon tore his focus away from the grisly scene.